The Black Riders and Other Lines | War Is Kind | uncollected poems
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Edited by Christopher Benfey

“This collection of poetry is fascinating, it more ambitiously, in his words, addresses the concerns of Crane’s prose . . . The handsome printing and Benfey’s helpful introduction and notes form an appropriate coat for such a rich collection.”—Cray Allred, BlogCritics.org

The reputation of Stephen Crane’s prose masterpieces ought never obscure his singular contribution to American poetry. Just as Crane’s novels and sketches helped usher in a new mode of impressionistic realism, Crane’s poems are like no one else’s before or since, extraordinary harbingers of the poetic revolution of the early twentieth century. In The Black Riders (1895), War Is Kind (1899), and the best of his uncollected poems, Crane forged his own idiom: abrupt, compact, sharply visual, and brutally indifferent to the niceties of late Victorian verse. These spontaneous utterances—Crane said they came to him “in little rows, all made up, ready to be put down on paper,” sometimes five or six a day—seem now like a prophetic blast of the modernist era that was to follow, as Crane achieves what editor Christopher Benfey describes as his aim in his poetry: “to identify the truth about human existence as he conceives it, a truth that is difficult and austere, and rescue it from what he perceives to be competing and overly facile versions of it.”

In tones alternately sardonic and rueful, Stephen Crane’s poems, although small in scale, address immense problems of cosmic justice and the purpose of human life. They are not quite like anything else in American poetry: uncompromisingly harsh, gnomic, deliberately anti-poetic, and shot through with unforgettable phrases and perceptions. Benfey’s edition collects all of Crane’s poems and provides an introduction illuminating their biographical and cultural context.

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His books include The Double Life of Stephen Crane, Degas in New Orleans, The Great Wave, and A Summer of Hummingbirds. He edited Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings, volume #190 in The Library of America.

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Christopher Benfey

The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895)
I. “Black riders came from the sea”
II. “Three little birds in a row”
III. “In the desert”
IV. “Yes, I have a thousand tongues”
V. “Once there came a man”
VI. “God fashioned the ship of the world carefully”
VII. “Mystic shadow, bending near me”
VIII. “I looked here”
IX. “I stood upon a high place”
X. “Should the wide world roll away”
XI. “In a lonely place”
XII. “Well, then, I hate Thee, unrighteous picture”
XIII. “If there is a witness to my little life”
XIV. “There was crimson clash of war”
XV. “‘Tell brave deeds of war.’”
XVI. “Charity, thou art a lie” 18
XVII. “There were many who went in huddled procession”
XVIII. “In Heaven”
XIX. “A god in wrath”
XX. “A learned man came to me once”
XXI. “There was, before me”
XXII. “Once I saw mountains angry”
XXIII. “Places among the stars”
XXIV. “I saw a man pursuing the horizon”
XXV. “Behold, the grave of a wicked man”
XXVI. “There was set before me a mighty hill”
XXVII. “A youth in apparel that glittered”
XXVIII. “‘Truth,’ said a traveller”
XXIX. “Behold, from the land of the farther suns”
XXX. “Supposing that I should have the courage”
XXXI. “Many workmen”
XXXII. “Two or three angels”
XXXIII. “There was One I met upon the road”
XXXIV. “I stood upon a highway”
XXXV. “A man saw a ball of gold in the sky”
XXXVI. “I met a seer”
XXXVII. “On the horizon the peaks assembled”
XXXVIII. “The ocean said to me once”
XXXIX. “The livid lightnings flashed in the clouds”
XL. “And you love me?”
XLI. “Love walked alone”
XLII. “I walked in a desert”
XLIII. “There came whisperings in the winds”
XLIV. “I was in the darkness”
XLV. “Tradition, thou art for suckling children”
XLVI. “Many red devils ran from my heart”
XLVII. “‘Think as I think,’ said a man”
XLVIII. “Once there was a man”
XLIX. “I stood musing in a black world”
L. “You say you are holy”
LI. “A man went before a strange god”
LII. “Why do you strive for greatness, fool?”
LIII. “Blustering god”
LIV. “‘It was wrong to do this,’ said the angel”
LV. “A man toiled on a burning road”
LVI. “A man feared that he might find an assassin”
LVII. “With eye and with gesture”
LVIII. “The sage lectured brilliantly”
LIX. “Walking in the sky”
LX. “Upon the road of my life”
LXI. “There was a man and a woman”
LXII. “There was a man who lived a life of fire”
LXIII. “There was a great cathedral” 66
LXIV. “Friend, your white beard sweeps the ground” 67
LXV. “Once, I knew a fine song” 68
LXVI. “If I should cast off this tattered coat”
LXVII. “God lay dead in Heaven”
LXVIII. “A spirit sped”

War Is Kind (1899)
“Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind”
“What says the sea, little shell?”
“To the maiden”
“A little ink more or less!”
“‘Have you ever made a just man?’”
“I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night”
“ ‘I have heard the sunset song of the birches”
“Fast rode the knight”
“Forth went the candid man”
“You tell me this is God?”
“On the desert”
“A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices”
“The wayfarer”
“A slant of sun on dull brown walls”
“Once a man clambering to the house-tops”
“There was a man with tongue of wood”
“The successful man has thrust himself ”
“In the night”
“The chatter of a death-demon from a tree-top”
“The impact of a dollar upon the heart”
“A man said to the universe”
“When the prophet, a complacent fat man”
“There was a land where lived no violets”
“There was one I met upon the road”
“Aye, workman, make me a dream”
“Each small gleam was a voice”
“The trees in the garden rained flowers”
Intrigue
“Thou art my love”
“Love, forgive me if I wish you grief ”
“Ah, God, the way your little finger moved”
“Once I saw thee idly rocking”
“Tell me why, behind thee”
“And yet I have seen thee happy with me”
“I heard thee laugh”
“I wonder if sometimes in the dusk”
“Love met me at noonday”
“I have seen thy face aflame”

Uncollected Poems
I’d Rather Have—
“Ah, haggard purse, why ope thy mouth”
“Little birds of the night”
“A god came to a man”
“One came from the skies”
“There is a grey thing that lives in the tree-tops”
“intermingled”
“A soldier, young in years, young in ambitions”
“A row of thick pillars”
“Chant you loud of punishments”
“If you would seek a friend among men”
“A lad and a maid at a curve in the stream”
A Prologue
Legends
“A man builded a bugle for the storms to blow”
“When the suicide arrived at the sky”
“A man said: ‘Thou tree!’”
“A warrior stood upon a peak and defied the stars”
“The wind that waves the blossoms”
“Oh, a rare old wine ye brewed for me”
“Tell me not in joyous numbers”
“When a people reach the top of a hill”
“A man adrift on a slim spar”
“There exists the eternal fact of conflict”
“On the brown trail”
“Rumbling, buzzing, turning, whirling Wheels”
“The Battle Hymn”
“Unwind my riddle”
“A naked woman and a dead dwarf ”
“A grey and boiling street”
“Bottles and bottles and bottles”
“The patent of a lord”
“My cross!”